M Train
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Description
From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.
Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.
Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.
Book Information
Posts
Patti, Patti, Patti. Our relationship is a complicated one, since she is the only author who can write things that are completely beyond me and yet hit me right in the feels. Honestly: Reading "M Train" in retrospect felt like reading gibberish that I just could not... stop consuming?! What WAS that? Patti's musings are esoteric, wondrous, magical. That is exactly what her writing feels like: No plot, no sense, just her astounding mind absorbing the world around her in the most Patti way, that is, in a way that I have yet to experience outside of Patti Smith's books. So I am afraid my review will be just as scattered, just as muddled, but probably not half as poetic as "M Train" was. What WAS "M Train", though? It was brown toast and black coffee, olive oil and well-thumbed paperbacks, it was Mexico and Iceland, grief and love and the poetry of everyday life, of New York stoops and beach cafés, of hotels and bungalows, writers, artists, lovers. It was cats and frizzy hair, polaroids and ball point pens, in short: It was Patti's life, an inexorably creative, connected and love-filled life. And yet, and yet. I don't know why this memoir failed to shake me to my core, all the necessary variables were there, but it just... didn't quite GET me. So 3.5 stars for a beautiful book. A beautiful, beautiful book.
Description
From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.
Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.
Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.
Book Information
Posts
Patti, Patti, Patti. Our relationship is a complicated one, since she is the only author who can write things that are completely beyond me and yet hit me right in the feels. Honestly: Reading "M Train" in retrospect felt like reading gibberish that I just could not... stop consuming?! What WAS that? Patti's musings are esoteric, wondrous, magical. That is exactly what her writing feels like: No plot, no sense, just her astounding mind absorbing the world around her in the most Patti way, that is, in a way that I have yet to experience outside of Patti Smith's books. So I am afraid my review will be just as scattered, just as muddled, but probably not half as poetic as "M Train" was. What WAS "M Train", though? It was brown toast and black coffee, olive oil and well-thumbed paperbacks, it was Mexico and Iceland, grief and love and the poetry of everyday life, of New York stoops and beach cafés, of hotels and bungalows, writers, artists, lovers. It was cats and frizzy hair, polaroids and ball point pens, in short: It was Patti's life, an inexorably creative, connected and love-filled life. And yet, and yet. I don't know why this memoir failed to shake me to my core, all the necessary variables were there, but it just... didn't quite GET me. So 3.5 stars for a beautiful book. A beautiful, beautiful book.